Learning through experience: making sense of students' learning through service learning

This study asks how we can make sense of students' learning in service learning. I employed a qualitative research methodology to explore the learning experiences of four students as they journeyed through the UCT Global Citizenship course: Thinking about volunteering: service, boundaries and power. This is a service learning course which attracts students from all disciplines and years of study. The course has two learning components: the students' self-organised voluntary community service, which forms the primary learning text, and guided facilitation and reflection through face-to-face and online learning activities. I had access to students' coursework which provided two written reflective assignments and a number of online blogs. At a later stage I conducted small-scale in-depth interviews. I used two methods to organise and analyse the data. The first was an analytic framework made up of three interconnected learning domains of 'knowing', 'being' and 'acting' (adapted from Barnett and Coate, 2005); the second was qualitative thematic analysis. My data suggest that we can make sense of students' learning in service learning through an analysis of students' 'being' in relation to their 'knowing' and 'acting'. My data also show that 'being' is embedded in students' 'knowing' and 'doing' and therefore 'being' is a key component of student learning. Additionally, the concept of a 'learning journey' is useful in positioning learning as something that takes place over time and in space. Finally, my data show that context matters: students' "personal foundations of experience" (Boud and Walker, 1991) influence their learning, as does the more immediate context of the classroom and their community service work. This study ends by briefly pointing to two key 'enablers' of students' learning, critical reflection and peer learning